ALL THAT WE KNOW OF DREAMING

PENNI RUSSON

It was the children who woke me this morning, tiptoeing in and out, peering at me sleeping. I could hear them talking in the hall, or rather I perceived a ceaseless humming that gradually became their voices. I rolled over and played possum until the youngest of the three sisters, Mimi, settled on the end of the bed, weighing down my legs, watching me. At night sometimes I hear her, somnambulating from room to room, rustling curtains, scratching her fingernails against the walls, bumping into furniture. She dreams with her eyes open. I have forgotten how to dream.

After some rapid whispering among themselves, the children refused to tell me where you had gone. So I left the breakfast unmade to show them I would not tolerate their tricksiness and went down to the orchard to check the pears. The little silver car – mine – sat in the carport, like some kind of domesticated pet. Your car was gone. The morning was dazzling and damp; a fine mist hovered over the opposite hills.

As I walked down the low stone steps into the orchard, I pictured you netting the twin pear trees at the beginning of summer, tossing the large white nets over the stretching body of each tree with a graceful gesture, like covering a bed with a sheet. Today, after weeks of alighting on the topmost branches and clambering over the mesh, the morning birds have found their way inside the net, and they’re raucous with fruit.

The pears trouble me. A fortnight ago I went to touch one to see if it was ready to pick. One side was smooth, classical, like the curve from waist to hip. Yet just as I laid my hand on the hardness of the pale green skin, I saw that the other side of the pear had been eaten out, and the fruit was filled with quivering wasps, entering and exiting, gorging on the interior. The wasps grew slow when the weather got cold, or perhaps the recalcitrant neighbour finally poisoned the nest on the boundary of his property – whatever the case, we haven’t seen one for days; they no longer squeeze through gaps in the house, the husks of them no longer litter the window sills, baking dry in the sun. I returned to the house. The mist was rising from the hills; dry sunlight crept across the yard. In the house, Mimi, the baby, was crying and the other two stood over her, pinching her fiercely to make her stop. When she saw me she stopped anyway.

I took pity on them and cracked eggs into a bowl, frothed them with the whisk and swirled them into a pan. I made one omelette and cut it into three. The little girls ate obligingly but without appetite. When they were done I told them to go outside and play. The older ones made for the orchard, full of plans for catching a bird and making it a pet. Mimi stood at the open door, looking wistfully back over the threshold, but I knew she dared not come back inside. Not while I was there, haunting the rooms, waiting for you to come home.

I fixed up the beds, starting with the children’s, vigorously shaking the last vestiges of sleep – flaked skin, dried insect scales – out of the blankets. Outside the birds were belling to each other. The older girls played in the orchard, cackling like hens. No sound from Mimi, probably nestled in the middle branches of a tree. Treelike herself: half of the soil, half of the sky, bending where the wind takes her but fixed in place by other, sturdier forces. Isn’t she pale, like paperbark?

In our room I stood at the end of the unmade bed, looking over the shape of us, where we had been sleeping. I pulled hard at the bottom sheet, which peeled from the bed and billowed around me like a sail, filling the room. Under the sheet, time stood still. Outside, it sped up. The day travelled over the fields, rushing towards me, with unknown intentions. Mid-morning, my sister rang. She was not in the least sorry to hear about the pears – ‘Three dollars a kilo at the supermarket!’ – and she thought your absence unremarkable. ‘Do you always keep tabs on each other?’ I’m embarrassed to tell her that most of the time we do. It never occurred to me that marriages could go any other way. I stretched the phone as far as I could, uncurling the cord, so I could see out the window. The big girls flitted from tree to tree. Mimi hung solemnly on the gate, fingers gripping the mesh. A flock of cockatoos flew overhead.

‘Sometimes I think it’s us out there,’ I said, ‘playing under the trees. One of those games that stretched from summer to summer, that we could pick up and leave off for months at a time.’

‘Oh, I see us all the time,’ my sister replied, as if it were not news. ‘Every time I look out the window when I’m riding the train into the city. There we are: stalking through the long grass in the wasted land by the tracks, scrambling over a fence, telling secrets, collecting stones. Long scratches on our arms, bruises on our legs, dried grass and leaves tangled in our hair.’

‘But if they’re us,’ I said, watching as the older girls squatted down together and poked at something in the dirt, ‘does that make me Mum?’

‘Oh God, no!’ my sister said. The older girls scooped up something apparently alive, then disappeared around the side of the house.

‘Well then, who am I?’ My voice sounded far more plaintive than I meant it to.

‘You don’t have to be Mum,’ my sister said, as if we were in a game and she was in charge of delegating roles. ‘You can be one of the godly matrons.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

She giggled, then suddenly: ‘Is that really the time? Shit!’ She hung up without saying goodbye. That was typical of Sofie. Or had it been Hillie? You always say we sound exactly the same, we three sisters, our voices high and sibilant, as if we were still children.

I took lunch outside, to the orchard. I spread out a blanket and ate with the girls. The autumn sunlight was warm, a bee droned in the lavender and a familiar faint boredom settled over me. They were like puppies, the girls, tumbling over and lying on top of each other. Their bodies spilled off the blanket; they tussled, fighting for territory.

Amid this jostle I saw our neighbour, Murray, pass by the gate. His dog sniffed around the fence and the girls attempted to entice it in with crusts of bread.

‘Hello!’ I called out.

‘Car’s gone off the road.’

‘God, really? Where? Is it serious?’

‘Up near Creek Road. Hit a roo. Big one too. Car’s a write-off.’

‘Is anyone hurt?’

He squinted at the sun. ‘Couldn’t see no one.’

‘How awful!’

He shrugged and whistled his dog.

After lunch, the big girls disappeared again, to twitter in the trees or hide under the verandah. I left the back door open and put boxes of juice and a container of broken biscuits on the kitchen bench for the older ones. Mimi was too young to leave behind, so I strapped her into the car and drove up over the crest of the hill and down to the creek road. It wasn’t far, but it would have been an impossible walk with Mimi. You could have done it, set Mimi on your broad shoulders and waltzed her down the road.

I saw the roo first, and I parked alongside it. ‘Kanga’s having big dreams,’ I told Mimi as I unbuckled her straps. She looked down at it with wide eyes. ‘Soon it will wake up and hop away home.’ It’s what she believes of death anyway. She believes any thing caught out in the world alone is on its way to Mummy. Every insect, spider, bird, human man or kangaroo she has ever encountered – living or dead – is a temporarily lost child.

Mimi wrapped her legs around me like a monkey and we stood beside the car together, looking down the bank between the road and the deep channel of the dry creek bed. This wreck had been here for years, for decades, its chassis rusting into the understorey. I’d seen it here before on my summer walks, when the evenings were long and mellow and the air creamy sweet. I’d even thought about photographing it, but I could never be bothered carrying the camera that far. And it wasn’t that I wanted to photograph it exactly. It was more that, every time I passed, I told myself that I meant one day to look at it. Really look at it. Perhaps that was why I was compelled to stagger down the embankment now, hefting Mimi aside, so I could see past the child in my arms to the placement of my own feet. Or it might have been this: since I stopped dreaming, everything has taken on the same weight. The tissue of meaning that connects things has grown wild and dangerous, now everything is connected, everything is enmeshed.

I walked around the car’s deteriorating exoskeleton. Its soft insides had long since rotted away. Long grass grew under the car roof and inside the bonnet. The steering wheel and the gear box, the entire engine, was gone, the tyre-stripped wheels sunk into the ground, which had formed a new hard surface around them, as if the car had grown there, and if you dug – I could see it in my mind like a botanical cross-section of a turnip – you’d find a complex network of mechanical roots branching far down into the earth.

Behind me, the bush murmured to itself: the tone-deaf song of a frog, the whirring of unseen insects, the bobbing throats of bellbirds, or simply the faintest whisper of leaves brushing together. I felt if I stood here long enough with Mimi, if we were still enough, someone would emerge from that sound, from the heart of the forest. The lost driver of that ancient car perhaps, in sepia tones like his rusted-out chassis, clutching a bleeding head. Or three little girls, living naked and wild in the bush, mud in their hair, fingernails grown like claws, hauling real human babies around like playthings. Or my mother, dressed for luncheon in her powdery-blue suit and coral-pink lipstick.

Mimi was heavy in my arms. She twirled a finger in her hair; her head drooped onto my shoulder. I put her gently down on the long silken grass. ‘It’s just for a moment,’ I promised. ‘Wait here.’ I clambered up the embankment. I looked back at Mimi. She had settled herself down on the grass to wait patiently, a bird in a nest.

I followed the black marks on the road: looping skids, as if the car had been dancing with the kangaroo, with slow balletic grace. The other car was just around the bend.

It was a completely alien object; it may as well have fallen from the sky. Dazzling red and broken, its entire front had folded in, the windscreen a spider web of cracks. The wheels were badly bent and twisted, reminding me, with a visceral chill, of broken limbs. I hovered on the edge of the road. Now I had seen it, I wanted nothing to do with it.

I realised what I had intended was impossible: to come and look upon this wreck, to make some kind of sense of its existence, and then leave it behind me. What if someone was in that car, had slithered to the floor, gasping their last shallow breaths? Or another had been flung from the car and lay close by, quietly bleeding? I sidestepped down the rocky hill. Inside, it smelt strongly of aftershave, and also damp, like the soil was already creeping in. The glove box yawned open, its contents meticulously cleared out. There was nothing, not a drop of human presence.

With a jolt, I remembered Mimi. How long had I left her? I scrambled up the rocky hill and gravel escarpment. There was my car on the road, and the deflating body of the kangaroo. There, down in the rushes and the weeds, was the body of the rusted wreck. But where was Mimi?

I must have run down the bank, my shoes skidding on the loose ground, but as I compose this I remember it as freefalling, as if I kicked off the earth, threw off the shackles of gravity just for a moment, and let myself plummet safely to the spot where Mimi had been.

‘Mimi?’ I called but the forest threw my voice back. Me? it asked. Me?

Your search would have been methodical, circling in ever-increasing rings that would scorch themselves on the earth like a bullseye. I zigzagged frantically back and forth, always returning to the patch of dirt and grass where I had left her, as if I might have simply failed to see her. Space would unfold like a flower and reveal her sleeping in its heart.

Many thoughts entered me at the same time, one on top of the other. I was no longer one person, but many possible versions of myself, clumsily overlaid to occupy – more or less – the same space and time. One of me believed I must have left her at home accidentally, like I might a purse or a mobile phone, and brought only a phantom with me, a dream of Mimi, not the girl. One thought that you had come, seen the car, discovered her, scooped her up thoughtlessly and taken her away, like the pair of gloves we found pegged to the fence, weeks after they’d been lost. Or the forest had taken her, my third daughter of a third daughter; such a creature was destined to have a curious, wandering fate. Or the drivers of the two cars formed together in my mind into one misshapen, predatory thing and dragged her away for meat. I wondered if I even had a daughter – Me? Me? – or if she was just a conjuring trick? Was it a sister I was looking for all along? And which one – Hillie? Or Sofie? One thing was clear to all of my selves: if she was gone then my life was also gone; I too would disappear and begin again as something new.

In the end I gave up. I knew she wasn’t there. Or if she was, she was somehow beyond my reach. I climbed back up the bank to our car, keys in hand.

I’d like to tell you that, as I climbed out of that deep ditch, everything fell silent, nothing stirred – not a twig, not a blade of grass. But the trees continued to murmur among themselves, frogs pipped, birds sang their same throatful of notes. ‘Nothing to see here, folks,’ the broken-down cars said. ‘Keep moving. Keep on moving along.’

I opened the car door. And there was Mimi, between the back and front seats, curled up asleep on the floor. Her face when she’s sleeping relaxes into the tiny baby she once was; her bones become soft and spongy. I scooped her up gently, without waking her. I placed her into her infant seat and buckled the straps. When I glanced into the rearview mirror she was awake, staring back at me with fierce dark eyes, but later when I turned around, I saw she had gone back to sleep, her head to one side, her mouth puckered into a rich full raspberry kiss.

She was still asleep, still buckled into the car, when you came home.

*

It’s nighttime. You lie beside me. I cannot sleep, so I write this in my head. You will never read it; by daytime, these words will have been carried away, though I tell myself that, first thing, I will write them down. Our daughters sleep in the next room, three sisters, their legs curling up to protect their hearts. Somewhere in the city are my own sisters. They stand in front of their separate mirrors, putting on lipstick the way Mum used to, smearing the colour on and then rubbing their stretched lips together. Diva Red, Honey Shimmer, Cha Cha Cha.

Mimi is restless. I can hear her turning in her bed. When I close my eyes, darkness swirls. I crouch on the edge of a vertiginous night. When I sleep, I will not dream. But before sleep comes I see her stand up, on her roly-poly legs. She’s looking around for me. I hear her faintly – ‘Mummy?’ and then again, ‘Mum-me/’ – but her tiny voice is swallowed by the forest as mine was. I see her climb the hill, hard work for such stout little legs; she slips back a little, she scrapes her knee. She is brave and does not cry. She makes it over the loose verge of the bank, hauling herself up by the bendy trunks of young trees.

She has to visit with the kanga first, to squat down and pat it with a flat open palm.

‘Mummy back soon,’ she says. ‘Nigh-nigh, Kanga.’

She lifts the handle of the car door with both hands. Of course I’ve left it unlocked – I always do. A tidy child by nature, she pulls it closed behind her. She sits on the seat and slides on her bum to the car floor, and a giggle explodes out of her. She wants to do it again – again and again and again – but it’s a lot of effort to get her top-heavy body back onto the seat. Anyway, something on the floor catches her attention, a toy one of the big girls has dropped: small and hard and plastic. A blue-grey cat, quite true to life. She lies down and looks at it, until her eyes blink closed. Nestled inside the husk of the car, like a fairy child scooped into a seed pod, lulled by the silver voices of the bell-birds, she’s asleep before I’ve even noticed that she’s gone.